Random Tech Questions you want answered.

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There's no longer a real home use program, but I believe you can still get a discount through your employer. I can renew the subscription at 70€ per year, so at a 30% discount. I'm not sure though, we are a Microsoft partner so that might be a reason too.

Anyone have a recommendation as far as a mesh networking kit goes?

I have been tasked by my father-in-law-to-be to pick out a new mesh networking kit. Their house is a 100+ year old townhouse with three floors and a basement and some substantial walls that I don't think a single router could cover. I've already set up an old router as a repeater on the third floor where my fiancee and I have been staying while we renovate our house, but it looks like this isn't cutting it anymore.

I work at a Costco and the new Netgear Nighthawk Mesh System caught my eye as I had always heard good things about the standalone Nighthawk router, but reviews of the mesh network are middling at best.

Usually my go-to for recommendations of this sort is the Wirecutter, but their guide hasn't been updated since January and there are a number of new WiFi 6 systems out since then.

At present I'm leaning towards the TP-Link Mesh Kit, but if anyone has a recommendation against it or for something else I'm all ears.

Make sure it has WPA-3 Personal, which allows WPA-2 Personal devices to connect securely. As I understand it, that's the transitional accommodation.

Is Ubiquiti still the go to for mesh stuff?

I'm not sure it's ever been the go-to for mesh, although it seems to regard it as important enough to support it in more than one product line (unless I'm misreading some of the Unifi AC feature list). Velop's Tri-Band mesh line was the top pick the last I looked at solutions.

If you can hang tough for a few more months, the FCC just released a new frequency band for indoor use, pretty much all of 6GHz, which is a gigantic range. That air is completely uncluttered at the moment, and because it doesn't penetrate walls that well (very slightly worse than 5GHz, but not really enough to notice), your signals tend to stay local, meaning they don't interfere with anyone else, and their signals mostly won't bother you. It's totally clear now, but it should remain pretty clear in the future, because "enemy" APs will be strongly attentuated by the exterior walls of both their houses and yours.

WiFi 6E (the E is for extended frequency range) gear, when it hits, should allow for massive backhaul through your home, probably well over a gigabit, and should allow you to run multiple clients on regular 5.8GHz, and then when 6E client adapters start showing up, you'll be able to serve them at very high speed, as well.

Downside: it'll probably be expensive. These units will work best with at least four radios.... 2 on 6GHz, one for backhaul and one for clients, and (at least) 1 each for 5.8 and 2.4. And the software to run everything is going to be really complex, so expect to pay a lot for a high-quality 6E mesh kit.

Thanks for the input folks.

My father in law is not a patient man, so waiting for a few more months for more features isn't really an option. (That being said, I myself will probably be in the market for a mesh system in 3-6 months, so all the info is good to hear. Thanks Malor!)

I think I've settled on the TP-Link kit given the features my FIL needs and amount of money he's willing to spend. If it ends up not working out for whatever reason, Costco's return policy is very good (and I know the folks at the returns desk pretty well) so I can always return it and pick out another.

Is there an app for windows that creates a little on screen widget that you can program hotkeys for touch screens?

If I get an Amazon Basics HDMI cable, can I assume it can handle whatever DRM and other protocols are now required to get devices to shake hands? Or should I go for a specific brand?

The one I just looked up has this as a bullet:

Meets the latest HDMI standards (4K Video at 30 Hz, 2160p, 48 bit/px color depth) that supports bandwidth up to 18Gbps and backwards compatible with earlier versions

Unless you're using some extraordinarily odd device with greater demands than that, you should be fine.

As far as DRM, they couldn't sell it as an "HDMI" cable with that branding if it didn't meet the HDMI standard, which includes the HDCP requirements.

dejanzie wrote:

If I get an Amazon Basics HDMI cable, can I assume it can handle whatever DRM and other protocols are now required to get devices to shake hands? Or should I go for a specific brand?

You don't have to worry about DRM (HDCP is baked into HDMI so there is nothing you have to worry about on that front) you just need to worry about what version of the HDMI spec you need to make the most out of your devices. For instance an old HDMI 1.0 cable isn't a good cable to use with a UHD Bluray player and a Dolby Atmos sound system. Alternatively a HDMI 2.1 cable should work with any device with an HDMI connector so if you get those you should be good.

NSMike wrote:

The one I just looked up has this as a bullet:

Meets the latest HDMI standards (4K Video at 30 Hz, 2160p, 48 bit/px color depth) that supports bandwidth up to 18Gbps and backwards compatible with earlier versions

Unless you're using some extraordinarily odd device with greater demands than that, you should be fine.

As far as DRM, they couldn't sell it as an "HDMI" cable with that branding if it didn't meet the HDMI standard, which includes the HDCP requirements.

Thanks! It's to connect the TV decoder to our Onkyo receiver and 1080p TV, all technology at least 5 years old. The connection has started to drop occasionally, and the cable is the easiest/cheapest to test. I get the impression sometimes that choosing an HDMI (or USB) cable has become about as complicated as metaphysics!

dejanzie wrote:
NSMike wrote:

The one I just looked up has this as a bullet:

Meets the latest HDMI standards (4K Video at 30 Hz, 2160p, 48 bit/px color depth) that supports bandwidth up to 18Gbps and backwards compatible with earlier versions

Unless you're using some extraordinarily odd device with greater demands than that, you should be fine.

As far as DRM, they couldn't sell it as an "HDMI" cable with that branding if it didn't meet the HDMI standard, which includes the HDCP requirements.

Thanks! It's to connect the TV decoder to our Onkyo receiver and 1080p TV, all technology at least 5 years old. The connection has started to drop occasionally, and the cable is the easiest/cheapest to test. I get the impression sometimes that choosing an HDMI (or USB) cable has become about as complicated as metaphysics!

Looking at the linked product looks like it is HDMI 2.0 so yea you should be good with older stuff. If you were doing 4k or High Refresh Rate you would need a better cable. Here are three handy tables from Wikipedia:

Oops this one is at HDR10:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/OQ4sBDg.png)

This one is non-HDR:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/dAdS1tW.png)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/uLZMb2d.png)

Amazing, copy-pasted that into an Evernote.

I'm having bluetooth audio problems that I'm hoping someone here will have good random knowledge about because it's driving me nuts. The issue is audio stuttering in my bluetooth headphones.

I know it's not the headphones, because they work great when connected to my phone.

I have a few-months-old high-end MSI gaming laptop with Windows 10 Professional. I can post some stats here if they'd be useful. I've tried: updating the audio drivers, updating the bluetooth drivers, updating Windows, just plain rebooting, making sure the headphones are charged, and changing my wireless mouse to just use its dongle instead of also using bluetooth at the same time as the headphones.

The stuttering gets so bad sometimes I have to just take the headphones off - it makes my eyes and brain twitch. It feels like my body is having some sort of malfunction. I can't figure out any rhyme or reason to why it's happening. It SEEMS to happen more when the laptop is processing something intensive, but it doesn't do that all the time. Anyone else run into problems like this?

Are the Bluetooth mouse and the headphones (and maybe the keyboard?) operating off of a USB hub, perchance? It could be that there's just not enough bandwidth through the hub and your audio (and everything else) ends up getting time-sliced to bits...

Keyboard is wired, so that's not it. And today I stopped using the mouse's bluetooth functionality in favor of this little USB dongle (it's a Logitech mouse), so I don't think that's it. The computer is a laptop and I don't have a USB hub connected to it, but I'm not sure how it's set up internally.

Right now it's just the keyboard and mouse connected to their own USB ports, and the headphones as the only thing on bluetooth. It doesn't seem TOO bad at the moment, like I haven't heard a skip in a while. Would USB somehow affect bluetooth connection quality?

d4m0 wrote:

Keyboard is wired, so that's not it. And today I stopped using the mouse's bluetooth functionality in favor of this little USB dongle (it's a Logitech mouse), so I don't think that's it. The computer is a laptop and I don't have a USB hub connected to it, but I'm not sure how it's set up internally.

Right now it's just the keyboard and mouse connected to their own USB ports, and the headphones as the only thing on bluetooth. It doesn't seem TOO bad at the moment, like I haven't heard a skip in a while. Would USB somehow affect bluetooth connection quality?

Possibly since they liekly run at similar radio frequencies. Are there a lot of 2.4ghz wi-fi signals in your area? Also, any chance you're near a microwave? It could be leaking a bit of radiation that easily disrupts 2.4ghz signals.

Yeah, that'd be my next guess, I suppose.

Yeah, came here to post that. My wireless PS4 and Switch controllers, who also use BlueTooth, started dropping connections and getting flakey inputs the moment I installed a more powerful wifi extender behind the tv stand.

So, your bluetooth adapter is likely built into your wireless network adapter. I would recommend also updating it's drivers. Here is a link to a similar issue.

https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?t...

Huh, it could be the wireless then. I'm in a regular sort of suburban area, so there isn't a huge amount of wifi around me, but there is some for sure. In my house anyway my stuff is connected via the 5GHz band, but who knows what my neighbors are doing. I'll give updating the wireless adapter drivers a try, thanks!

If you have only newer wireless clients on your network, and your AP supports it, you could look into disabling 2.4GHz completely, and running purely on 5GHz. This would guarantee the minimum possible interference with your Bluetooth devices. If you're in a house, and not an apartment, neighboring WiFi probably won't interfere with BT to a nearby receiver.

You could also try moving your AP further away from your Bluetooth station, if it's anywhere close by. Because of the inverse-square law, even a few feet can make a big difference if it's really close.

I went and downloaded the drivers for my specific wifi chip, which happens to be an Intel, instead of going to the MSI site and downloading what they had for the laptop. After installation and a reboot, things appear to be running perfectly so far. My laptop is maxed out doing a CPU-intensive operation and there is no stuttering at all. I'll try it out playing some Dark Souls later today and see how it goes, but I hope this has solved it.

Thanks for all the help! If I still have problems I'll give a shot to disabling the 2.4GHz on my wifi router, good idea Malor.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a wifi signal strength measuring app? iOS would be ideal, though I have access to Mac and Windows laptops I can walk around with too. Some apps and streams have problems switching from one access point to another, and I want to see if I can get away with turning one off and moving the other to a more central location. I realize I can do this by trial and error, but now I'm curious as to what my coverage actually looks like.

Vargen wrote:

Does anyone have a recommendation for a wifi signal strength measuring app? iOS would be ideal, though I have access to Mac and Windows laptops I can walk around with too. Some apps and streams have problems switching from one access point to another, and I want to see if I can get away with turning one off and moving the other to a more central location. I realize I can do this by trial and error, but now I'm curious as to what my coverage actually looks like.

I have used Kismet and Kismac (Mac port of Kismet). I think it may require having their networking chips but my Razer laptop came with Killer Networking Tools and it worked pretty well. No idea about an app for iOS. Generally the ones I have used require lower level access to the hardware than Apple probably allows on iOS.

Has anyone come across reviews of mesh router setups that specifically review how well they hand off devices from one node to the next? I'm having issues with my cheapie setup where it's A) not balancing devices across the three nodes (one node always connects to about half the devices of the others, even though it's not positioned further from most of our devices than the other two) B) not moving devices from one node to another as the device moves and the connected node's signal becomes weaker than one of the other nodes. Instead what seems to happen is the node will switch from 5ghz to 2.4ghz rather than letting it switch nodes. As a result I end up with devices that won't give up their connection even when I'm barely hitting 2-3mbps transfer speeds.

My setup has a feature called "fast roaming" that is supposed to quicken the handoff process, but it doesn't seem to do much to alleviate the issue.

After some googling, I found an article that indicated that one issue with 802.11r is that older devices don't have drivers that can figure out beacon frames, and so they will not switch on their own. That could mean that the problem devices are going with the strongest signal, and connect to that node, but then they think the other nodes are sending corrupt frames, so as the signal degrades, they think they have to request a change to a lower frequency (which will have more range).

So I wonder if this is not a situation like that.

Mesh network handoff is a combination of the wireless hardware and the device. It’s sometimes the devices fault.